Office Cleaning Guide
One pivotal but often overlooked aspect of a company’s success is its cleanliness and tidiness. Maintaining a clean and tidy office environment is one of the best ways to promote success both internally and externally. But why is this?
Primarily, cluttered and unorganised workspaces negatively affect your personal professional image and your company’s image. No matter what they say, first impressions count; having a disorganised mess in your office, therefore, can give the impression that you can’t organise your work, either. Tidiness creates a professional, respectable image that’ll encourage your clients to do business with you. It’ll also improve productivity among your employees!
But it isn’t just productivity that is affected by having a clean office. Workplace illness is one of the leading causes of inefficiency in the office, but it often stems from having an office that isn’t cleaned and maintained properly.
Dirty fridges and office equipment can see the violent spread of colds in your office, putting employees out of work for days at a time or reducing their efficiency, at least. However, with a professional cleaning service, skilled and experienced in maintaining hygienic environments, you can curb this as an issue.
Clearly, cleaning your office regularly is important. If you’re looking to ensure that your company continues to be a successful one, you’ll need a rigorous cleaning schedule in place.
How to Hire Commercial Cleaning Services
Managing an office comes with its challenges and its rewards, doesn’t it? You’re constantly handling new obstacles and pressures in an effort to make everyone’s workday comfortable, safe, and productive. However, it’s a gift to be able to provide that to others and it’s something you probably take a lot of pride in. You deserve to.
As an Office Manager, one of the key ways that you impact your team is by enhancing and preserving the environment in which they work. Your employees deserve to work in an environment that’s hygienic, decluttered, and free of distractions. Employees are often at the mercy of workplace conditions they can’t control
Although most companies require employees to help keep shared spaces clean, your employees weren’t hired to clean your office and neither were you. Hiring a commercial cleaning company can alleviate the burden on employees to keep things clean while ensuring that your office environment doesn’t suffer.
Benefits of Hiring a Commercial Cleaning Company
Before we can explore how to hire your commercial cleaner, you’ll need to decide whether outsourcing your office cleaning is worth the expense and the effort to manage another vendor. Later, we’ll offer recommendations for keeping this relationship easy to manage but first
A Better Working Environment
By keeping your office not just clean but professionally spotless, you can ensure greater employee satisfaction and productivity. Rather than navigating around piles of papers or starting wars over break room leftovers, your people will be busy doing the work they were hired to do in a way that’s comfortable for them.
Commercial Cleaning
office cleaning tasks
Our office cleaning checklist is designed to help business owners gain a better understanding of the type of tasks that you may need to complete on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Keep in mind, these tasks will vary depending on your unique workplace environment!
Common Daily Cleaning Tasks
It may seem like a lot of work, but it is important to complete daily (or almost-daily) cleaning in your office or workplace. If you don’t, dirt, debris, and dust can easily start to pile up and become a bigger, more challenging problem. In order to keep your work environment clean and healthier for you, your staff, and your customers or clients, the following daily tasks are recommended.
Reception Areas, Lobbies, and Work Spaces
Mopping of all hard floor and tiled areas
Vacuuming all floors
Empty waste bins, wash as needed and add new liners
Use standard glass cleaner to wipe down all glass areas
Damp-wipe hard surfaces with mild disinfectant
Polish brass and bright work
Clean walls and painted surfaces as needed
Wipe down door handles, light switches and baseboards
Keyboard cleaning
Break Rooms (Including Kitchen Break Rooms) and Washrooms
Empty waste bins, wash as needed and add new liners
Disinfectant mopping and wipe down of all hard surfaces
Sanitize and clean all basins, toilets, doors and fixtures in washroom
Refill soap dispensers
If there is a dishwasher, load all dishes and run
Wipe down all reflective surfaces including mirrors, brass, and glass
Use spray disinfectant on the sides of all surfaces including toilets, doors, sinks, and appliances
Along with your daily list, there are some cleaning tasks that should be done regularly but don’t necessarily have to be done on a daily basis. These tasks are as follows:
Office-Wide
Squeegee glass windows inside and out (as needed)
Polish and buff all hardwood surfaces including floors and conference tables
Empty refrigerator of all employee-brought food, clean, and disinfect
Empty and disinfect all trash receptacles, add new liners
A guide to hiring a commercial cleaning company
Hiring a commercial cleaning service can be an overwhelming task considering the different tasks that need to be performed, such as screening the company. To ensure your facility’s cleaning schedule is in competent hands, it is important that you treat the hiring of a cleaning company like hiring a new staff member.
Maintenance of a clean business environment is vital to company productivity, and therefore you should ask certain questions when screening candidates. This article will provide information on the questions that can help separate top cleaning companies from those that just don’t meet quality standards.
Do They Have Experience?
When hiring an experienced cleaning service, you can be assured that the job will be performed to the highest standard possible. While there is no harm in hiring a new cleaning service, this does come with certain risks regardless of the potential they may show. Established businesses have better reputations, treat their cleaners with respect, and have a long-standing list of clienteles who trust their services.
Do They Understand The Business?
An important point to consider is the type of facility you are running. Believe it or not, the industry in which you work makes a difference when it comes to cleaning an office. For instance, if you are working in a doctor’s surgery, the cleaning service will need to adopt a different approach to if they are cleaning a call center office.
What Should The Cleaning Schedule Look Like?
When hiring a cleaning company, you need to consider how often your working space needs to be cleaned. You also need to consider the workers and what times are convenient for cleaning staff to enter the property. For example, schools are typically cleaned each afternoon preparing them for the following day. However, sports facilities are cleaned early in the morning or at night after closing. If your business operates on a 24/7 rota, it may be best to hire the service to clean during a quiet period.
Commercial cleaning
Prepping the Office Area –
You’ll want to gather all of the necessary cleaning chemicals, equipment and accessories for the job. Load up your janitorial cart with supplies and chemicals and head towards the cleaning area. If any mopping or extensive cleaning is to be done, you’ll need to put up “closed for cleaning” signs and cordon off the area with the correct caution/wet floor signs
Daily Cleaning Procedures –
Visually check the area for any types of debris or paper. Pick these items up and dispose of them properly.
Vacuum up any dirt or debris that can’t be removed by hand. Using a backpack vacuum is a great way to quickly and efficiently vacuum up around office cubicles.
If there are any spots or stains on the carpets, floors, walls, furniture or baseboards immediately wipe those up. For carpet or upholstery stains, start by identifying the type of stain by using our stain removal instructions guide.
Weekly Cleaning Procedures –
Dust all surfaces, including desks, filing cabinets, cubicle walls and shelves.
Empty trash cans and replace garbage bags, a very popular size is the high density 10-15 gallon trash bags for individual offices. Clean trash can and surrounding area if necessary.
Wipe down desks, telephones, calculators, and computer keyboards thoroughly using a disinfectant spray that has been sprayed on a micro fiber cloth or a disinfecting wipe, like our germicidal disinfecting wipes.
Dust heating vents, ledges, door jambs and window sills at any easily reachable level.
Dust mop all tiled or hard surface floors, then sweep up that debris into dust pan following our dust mop procedures.
Wet mop all hard floor surfaces following our step by step floor mopping instructions.
Vacuum all carpeted floors, starting with the mats and runners, following our carpet vacuuming procedures.
Monthly Cleaning Procedures –
Clean wall-mounted units such as paper towel dispensers and hand dryers with a disinfectant spray or wipe. Paying special attention to all fixtures and items in the restroom, all the while following our restroom cleaning procedures.
Wipe down all vertical surfaces in the office with an all-purpose cleaner.
Spray buff hard surface floors following our spray buffing a floor or our burnishing a floor procedures. The spray procedures will be used with a low speed floor buffer, like our 20″ low speed floor buffing polisher. The burnishing procedures will be best utilized with a high speed burnisher like our ultra high speed burnisher. If the hard floor surfaces are particularly dirty start with scrubbing the floors with a low speed buffer.
Polish desks, tables, chairs, and any other wood objects by using a furniture polish to help maintain a professional shine.
Dust or vacuum all vents, overhead circular fans, and behind hard to reach areas like tables and desks.
Clean all windows with a glass cleaner to remove all marks and fingerprints.
Semi-Annual Cleaning Procedures –
Strip and recoat any tiled floors to remove scuff marks and any imperfections in the finish. Following our stripping a floor and our applying floor finish procedures will guarantee a high shine on your floor This will also make it extremely durable for long periods of time, extending the time between additional stripping and re-coatings.
Spray buff or burnish the floor immediately to make the finish “pop” as much as possible.
Institute a burnishing program to prolong the life of your floor, as well as maintaining its appearance at all times of the year.
Extract all carpeting, runners, mats and upholstery following our carpet extracting instructions. For any heavily soiled areas, or traffic pattern areas, follow our carpet bonneting instructions for proper carpet scrubbing instructions.